Thanks for the typo catch. Reposting with correction here.
Yes, this is from the Tony Rice recording. Is there a recording by Carpenter? I searched but turn up anything.




John Wilkes Booth was a Southern man;
Son of an actor in Maryland;
Bound for fortune on a gas-lit stage;
Bound to die at a tender age.

From Washington to Baltimore
He played the bills and he slept with whores;
And he burned inside with a hatred deep
For the man who caused the South to weep.

Young Abe Lincoln wasn't young no more;
A tired old man when he won the war;
And he dreamed at night of his death by the hand
Of a bitter world and a faceless man;

And he saw his body in a ghastly dream
Draped in black while his widow screamed;
Two silver dollars on his eyelids lay;
“Abraham Lincoln has died today.”

CHORUS:
And they said there were five, and they said there were ten;
Some said there was never more than just one man
Who would smile to see Mr. Lincoln dead
In the name of God and Dixie,
In the name of God and Dixieland.


John Wilkes Booth and his band of men
They'd failed before but would not again;
And Good Friday dawned with a fickle sun,
Then Booth declared the day had come.

And the word was passed and the guns were brought
Down to Mary Surratt’s boarding house;
Sealed in a note Booth named just four,
But would the gallows swing with many more.

CHORUS
(Same as before)

John Wilkes Booth went to his grave
With a bullet in his neck and a broken leg;
A patriot in his fantasy
Of redemption, grace, and bravery.

And those who were hanged and those who spent
Their lives behind a jailer's fence,
Only Booth could have proved them free
Of the taint of the conspiracy.

CHORUS
For they said there were five, and they said there were ten;
Some said there was never more than just one man
Who would smile to see Mr. Lincoln dead
In the name of God and Dixie,
In the name of God and Dixieland.